Friday, 23 September 2016

Early Bird has announced it is giving up, closing down, throwing in the towel, leaving its Crowdcube investors with no alternative but to visit the taxidermist; although they seem to have been stuffed already.

In a letter to shareholders, the founder and CEO says he is very sorry and tells how it is all the fault of this, or that or the other. Oliver Pugh is still comparing his business with Graze, even as it gasps its last breath. As one email sent to us today put it - this guy is delusional. Optimism is great but in the wrong hands it is a disaster. This was optimism on steroids.

Oliver - this was a poor idea, badly executed with which you managed to dupe the often foolish investors on Crowdcube. You never got anywhere close to your ridiculous projections. We can really only be thankful that the agony has now been ended and that thanks to us, the attempt to raise even more money on Envestors was stopped before you did anymore damage.

Could this have been prevented - most certainly. Pugh used highly dubious sales forecasts and customer numbers to gain access via Crowdcube, to investors' money. The customer 'base' was totally fictitious built as it was on one off, free or special offers. These are not customers - they are free loaders who will disappear as soon as their free goods are delivered. This type of manipulation could easily be stopped if the platform could be bothered. They cant.

Can we respectfully suggest Oliver, that you go and get some real business experience before trying this lark again. Well looks like Oliver didnt take this advice. Only two weeks ago, he opened yet another oine if his companies - all of which have failed to date. So look out for Earlybird Tea and if you have any sense avoid them.

NB We have since posting this been on the EB site and you can still buy and pay for the subscription!! It also states that the site is now being run by Eat Different Ltd.

Sunday, 18 September 2016

Birdsong are about to complete their £75k Crowdcube campaign - Congratulations.

If you look into their pitch you have to wonder why people are investing - maybe just love the luuv this ethically correct company are spreading.

A headline claim is that they have Bethnall Green Ventures behind them. Now this is true but if you check just how far behind them, they are using just one thumb to assist. Two tranches of £15k each to be precise - although to get this information you have to do some digging at CH. Why not just be up front guys? Do venture companies really invest that little??

Then there is the confusion over the number of 'customers' the business has/has had. In the pitch it states that they have 300 customers which for an on line retailer over 18 months is small. This fits with the equally small turnover for the period - they call this traction but we wouldnt. An avarage spend of £33 is not exciting. Also why is the financial projection using projected figures for YE March 2016? That'll be the Crowdcube OTL Dept.

Back to those customer figures - in a post by the founder, she states 'We have attracted over 35,000 users to the site since November 2015, and customers in 14 different countries.' Hmmm. This number is then used to verify the company valuation. What is a 'user'? Whats more, the founder then goes on to compare her company to Wool and the Gang, which if you remember was featured here for exiting at a 1% ROI or more if you accepted gift tokens instead of cash!

Yet they have run a successful Crowdcube campaign valuing their company at £850k. Stop the world, I need to get off.

Thursday, 15 September 2016

In a month where the wheels are rapidly coming off the Crowdcube company carrier. another Crowdcube success looks like closing. Or does it.

ineed has raised over £200k from Crowdcube in various quantities since 2012. It has consistently failed to deliver on any of its Crowdcube promises. Now its website is off line and new one has appeared offering a new service. Our first report that this company was closing looks like it was wrong - apologies and thanks to the prompt from Anon below.

In other news, Crowdcube recently presented a Sugru update PRing, declaring that the business, which took over £3m off Crowdcube investors only a year ago, has sold over 10m tubes of its glue. There was no mention of the enormous gap between the Crowdcube sales forecasts and the actual sales and the slightly sad attempt currently live on Envestors to raise another £1.5m - a raise that was not in the Crowdcube pitch; which took more than 3 times its £1m target. But who the hell cares - right?

Wednesday, 14 September 2016

Vibe Tickets was pitching on Crowdcube to raise £600k for its pre revenue on line tickets sale business valued at £5.4m.

With a week to go it was all looking a little sad, having only raised £340k with one investor putting in £260k of that. Now it has crossed the line, taking in a staggering £260k in just 7 days. What changed?

Good luck to all 311 investors. We'll be keeping an eye out for this success story.

Tuesday, 13 September 2016

A Suit that Fits has launched its own funding exercise, under the shade of Envestors' FCA license, having achieved little that the Crowdcube £800k pitch promised less than a year ago

One thing the Crowdcube pitch did not show was a new funding round. This after the amount in the pitch financials to make this business work was stated at only £500,000 against the achieved £800,000 plus. Now they need another £500k at approximately the same valuation.

The new prospectus shows that the company has strayed off the path they so carefully laid out only months ago and which Crowdcube verified in their OTL dept. Namley losses of £310k against realised losses of £460k.

Of course this fact doesnt quite make onto the new pitch deck.

Envestors are the platform that recently had the Early Bird business pitching.This was then withdrawn once it was pointed out they were touting their wares elsewhere and had failed on numerous occasions to explain why their projections were so far removed from the reality of their performance. They also currently have SUGRU asking for more cash - not it appears with much luck.

One interesting point that Envestors might like to look at with regards to the Suit that Fits offer. The offer gives a variety of rewards based on discounts for suit orders and a 20% bonus share award. Now it is our understanding having recently dealt with a similar offer and HMRC, that if you take up these cash incentives as part your investment, you lose some or all of your EIS relief. All comments welcome.

We were contacted by Funding Circle who say they will be continuing with property laons and the story on their forum was incorrect.

All this despite that fact that the Verto Homes (recently funded via Crowdcube) development at Towan Heights still has a large sum unpaid - apparently the lawyers are arguing over communal areas. That's an excuse we have not had before in the 16 pages and 4 months this saga has been trundling on.

Saturday, 10 September 2016

Only a few days ago we wrote about Little Brew - we now have confirmation that the company has ceased trading although it has not yet technically closed.

This collapse happened back in March this year and one has to wonder if Crowdcube knew about it? If they did then where was the announcement? There wasnt one - just the usual PRing about how great they are.Was this failure included in their summer £8m funding prospectus? If not surely that is contrary to FCA regulations?

Simply put, this business never stood a chance; like so many that fund on Crowdcube. The founder admits as much by telling shareholders the model didnt work. No doubt it was not for effort or diligence - it was just not well enough funded and could never gain any traction in an overcrowded niche market. He couldnt make a living out of it and so had no choice but to cease operations. What will follow will eventually be a final striking off by CH - the first gazette is already actioned. In the end Little Brew did less than the name suggests.

How many times do we need to see this happen before the FCA takes some action? Its now two Crowdcube closures this month already and we expect many more.

Friday, 9 September 2016

As we have been reporting, Funding Circle have been under the cosh over loans for the Verto Homes development at Towan Heights, Newquay.

Word on the FC forum is that they have now put a stop to any new loans to any future property developers. The Towan Heights development, featured prominently in the recent Crowdcube Verto Homes funding pitch, still has overdue loans outstanding. A fact that was never mentioned on the Verto Homes Crowdcube pitch.

One point which was hammered home in the pitch, was that Verto Homes were FC's largest property client. Well looks like they may have to find a new source from now on.

Little Brew's accounts are 3 months overdue. It's FB and Twitter sites have been inactive all year. It doesnt have any beer to sell and no outlets stock it. This looks like another Crowdcube success story.

Little Brew raised £110k off 160 investors at the start of 2014. Run by an enthusiast who then moved from London to York, we can find no reviews of the beers, no stockists and the website says their shop is open from 12 to 4pm on a Friday - you cannot buy online.

Doesnt sound much like the plan promoted to investors by Crowdcube where the turnover was over £800k for YE August 2016.

Still it just shows that counting the number of closed businesses - as Crowdcube love to do when the media pick on them - is no gauge for how the rest are doing.

That shop must be bloody busy each Friday - takings of just over £15k or roughly 3000 bottles sold in 4 hours - that's over 12 bottles per minute. They must use a time-lapse POS system.

Rebus' administrator's report tells us little new, apart from the on going enquiry into the management.

The sad tale of Rebus - funded via Crowdcube to the tune £800,000 and shortly afterwards defunct - takes one more step to completion.

We have written about this a many times - here . It's a classic case of appallingly poor due diligence by Crowdcube. The main man behind the company's Crowdcube raise was a currently banned FCA operator. This, if declared by Crowdcube, would surely have prevented this mess. They either chose to hide it or never knew about it.

So what are the consequences of this blatant negligence for Crowdcube? As usual absolutely nothing. Are they really already too big to fail?

Wednesday, 7 September 2016

This platform claims to be highly transparent and uses a network of HNW and Angels to back companies (to a min of 30%) before offering the deal to the crowd. Joining is even easier than Crowdcube.

Sounds good?

It maybe. However a brief excursion on to their platform quickly produces some oddities. They have a pitch by Cityzenith which has already raised £1.1m from 21 investors. The platform states that the top three investment amounts are £69k, £34k and £24k, leaving the remaining total at £972k from 18 investors, all of whom must have invested less than £24k. You can see where this going.............................. that does not compute.

Mind you the company's press release did state -

"There will always be failures and people will always lose money, but through our model we are hoping to turn the statistics on their head."Well they have certainly done that.

If it wasnt serious this would be hilarious. Seedrs and Syndicate Room have both issued entirely bogus 'valuations' of their portfolios - on the same day.

Both valuations show healthy gains for investors - but the catch is there have been no real gains because neither company has achieved an exit. Investors are locked in until this happens so its a paper exercise in PRING. It is also highly misleading and they should really know better. Its the kind of stupidity that Crowdcube excel at.

Its all really very disappointing. Seedrs held a secretive press briefing this morning which Syndicate Room clearly got wind of and pushed their announcement to 10.30, leaving Seedrs looking into the middle distance as SR disappeared over the virtual horizon.

Meanwhile the Syndicate Room PRING stated '' We’ve calculated that SyndicateRoom’s 2014–15 portfolio is valued at 135% of the original investment (as of May 2016, not including (S)EIS tax reliefs)''. The first word is the giveaway!

When are the main three UK platforms going to grow up and give as an ECF investment structure that works? Inventing returns, when its just as likely that all these so called increases will be expunged by failures, is just irresponsible.

Tuesday, 6 September 2016

Another one bites the dust. And another one etc etc

We have written about EEM before -http://fantasyequitycrowdfunding.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/east-end-manufacturing-getting-closer.htmlhttp://fantasyequitycrowdfunding.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/mind-gap-latest-players.html

We never thought they would make it - the pitch was poor and the plan was also poor. According to the note sent around to investors they were hard done by, by circumstances outside their control. Surely that reasoning would be better applied to the poor souls who trusted Crowdcube's due diligence and projections. They raised around £400k through Crowdcube from over 200 people in 2014.

In a Crowdcube blog, a sort of attempt to make them look like they care about about the businesses they help finance, the CEO of EEM said they expected to turn a profit this year. The blog here is dated 13 May 2016. Nice one Luke.

You can expect many more over the next few months.

Here for interest is the text of the conpany's last breath -

Dear Investors,It is with the utmost sadness that we have to report to you aseries of recent catastrophic adverse events affecting East EndManufacturing. This rapid series of bad news, coming since theend of June has served to render the company unable tocontinue trading, despite the fact that the business wasimproving year on year as per the last report to you after thelast AGM.

It is not for us to comment on the political landscape, but the rapid general downturn in manufacturing and retail from the end of June, has rendered the company so severely damaged,that despite all our efforts, we are not able to continue our business.

Despite manufacturing bouncing back in August led by those selling abroad thanks to the weaker Pound, we sell only in the UK and our raw materials are paid for in Dollars and Euros, so our costs have significantly increased.

In essence, we have lost our four most important clients inrapid succession, making up more than half of our business.Woven Wings (who have cancelled all future orders andstopped output because of failed sales); The Hut Group (whohave taken all future manufacturing offshore to save costs);Meng, a high end brand that is taking all production to Chinafrom September and Represent (who have not only stoppedfuture production and moved this out of London, but have alsosent large amounts of perfectly good stock back to us as theyare heavily overstocked and are refusing to proceed with Autumn/Winter orders they had originally planned. Additionally, other smaller clients have also got into difficulty.

The Directors' fiduciary duty is to ensure that creditors are paid and also that no new money comes into the business without a reasonable prospect of turning the business round. It would be wrong to borrow money or to ask for new equity funds without a good order book in place. This option was rejected.

This has left us to try to make an orderly closure of thebusiness: paying off creditors, laying off staff (yesterday), negotiating with the landlord (he has agreed to allow us to surrender the lease without penalty), calling in all outstanding funds to be collected and selling assets. This is currently taking place and we have today agreed the most sensible way forward is to appoint a professional to ensure this is done correctly.

From an investment loss point of view, Barry Laden will lose hisinvestment fully and has never received any tax benefits fromthat investment of around £50,000.However, all other investors will have benefited first from SEIS(at 50%) or EIS tax relief (at 30%) in the year you made yourinvestment.As for the remaining loss, you will now be able to claim lossrelief and the following links provide some useful information:

Please consult your tax advisor for further information because all private investors (apart from Barry Laden) in East End Manufacturing will qualify for some type of loss relief.

Please understand we are devastated by this terrible turn of events. Good people have lost their jobs and investors will not benefit from positive returns in the future. We tried very hard to create a business that believes in making products in this country, and for a few years we can be proud that we did exactly that for many brands and gave employment to tens of people; paying them properly and creating a wonderful working environment that set a benchmark for the industry.Sadly all this was not enough to save us from the onslaught that our sector of manufacturing is experiencing right now.

Thank you SO much for believing in East End Manufacturing as we have. As you can imagine, we have 263 shareholders so it will be difficult to answer any questions if you fire them back at us now, but please rest assured that we have done everything we can to try to make this business succeed. Unfortunately it was not to be in the end.The appointed professional will write to you next, to explain the position of the company and to confirm how they propose to settle the finances of the business.Yours sincerely,

You just have to watch the Seedrs video by Pronto, to see why the company failed - it's complete rubbish.

All equity crowdfunding pitches have videos to promote them. But we have never come across one like Pronto's.

We know that Seedrs are demanding in their due diligence but we have to question some of the facts in this video - given the very rapid journey to closure. It's worth watching.

Here are some of the claims and facts used to justify them - blue text is taken from the video but not verbatim.

Pronto will replace peoples' kitchens and will make it very difficult for supermarkets to survive. How do we know this - here are some facts -

Customers order on average 5 times a month

55% customers order weekly

75% customers order every 2 weeks

Mean customer spend is £45/mth

Median customer spend is over £100/mth

This means that the more you order from Pronto, the more you order from Pronto -

Median no of days between 1st and 2nd order is 9-10. So by the time you are on your 9th order its just 5 days apart and by the time you are on your 19th order, you are ordering every 4 days.

The business is growing at 6% week on week over the last 26 weeks.

How the hell did this get past Seedrs DD? And why did so much VC money believe this rubbish?

Customers are not stats and do not follow these ridiculous rules, percentage increases and customer medians are meaningless unless we have a starting point. The proof is very clearly shown by the outcome.

Pronto, the latest failure in the growing list of failures with companies funding via equity crowdfunding, is telling us something. But are we listening?

If you run a quick search on Pronto, you get a large number of hits from last year and this year talking about their success. Their awards, their funding , their plans. Its all very upbeat, very positive, very believable.

Less than 3 months after this success, these awards and these plans, had achieved over £800k in funding via the Seedrs platform, the founder of Pronto wrote to shareholders. He said that despite superhuman efforts by his team, the plans, the awards and the funding had achieved nothing and they were giving up, closing down, going home.

ECF encourages fatuous businesses to create ridiculous plans and promote themselves with shallow PR, which is then picked up by online media and mushroomed. Simply because they know that they can and it will raise cash - if not on this platform then one of the myriad of others out there. EIS and SEIS mean that investors who dont mind losing a little of their income if they can get some of it back via the tax relief, blindly put in their money.

Can we not see that this is not a sustainable way to build our country's SMEs?

Pronto raised over £800k on Seedrs just 3 months ago - it has now closed.

That is very fast.

In a deal that included two institutional investors and another £1m to be raised in September this year, the plans for Pronto seem to have imploded almost as fast as the funds rushed in. It seems incomprehensible to us that a business model can be brilliant in June and a dead duck in September. It appears that the £1m anticipated for this month was not forthcoming and it looks very like this may be considered a false inducement to investors in the June round.

Last year the company raised another £1m via institutional investors. At the time, co-founder James Roy Poulter stated to TechCrunch:

“We are building the food infrastructure of the future, replacing kitchens and supermarkets. Consumer facing apps represent less than 5% of our technology, it is the technology in the kitchens, at our HQ, and with our drivers that is important.”

We asked Seedrs for a comment and Jeff Lynn, the founder and CEO, was good enough to supply this -

"Pronto raised money on Seedrs earlier this year in a round led by prominent institutional investors Seedcamp and Playfair Capital. As planned, the Pronto team invested the funds into a hyper-growth strategy, but unfortunately despite their hard work they have had to make the difficult decision to cease trading. It is always unfortunate when a company fails, but failure is a common part of early-stage ventures due to their nature. Alongside Seedcamp and Playfair Capital, Seedrs will work with the business to ensure any remaining assets are distributed to shareholders and those investors with eligible EIS investments are able to claim their tax relief. We will as always keep Seedrs investors informed throughout the process."

The fall out from a such a fast demise, should be interesting to see. Seedrs of all the ECF platforms, has the most thorough due diligence and does employ people with some experience rather than interns. However, this failure coupled with Hokkei and Upper St, shows there is some room for improvement. All three failed very quickly after funding and its simply not good enough to claim that this is part of the way start ups perform.

Pronto's letter to shareholders from the founder, telling them of the closure would be better placed in a Mills & Boon novelette and should be accompanied by Barber's Adagio for Strings. Maybe it helps to explain Pronto's catastrophic failure. See below

All

It is with deep regret that I must inform you that we have had to make the decision to shut Pronto.

To be honest, there was hardly a decision; there was no choice. It was now our only option. As, over the last week we have had all fundraising options fall through. And now it would be wrongful for us to continue trading. We have had very lofty goals for this business. Goals that we knew, and have been clear, required significant funding to allow us to execute.

I have not managed to raise any of these further funds.

I think I will write in more detail about some things, however, right now, there are a brief few things I would say.

- You backed something that worked, and could have been unbelievably huge. There are no words that could understate the impact Pronto could have had.

- My entire team has given everything a human could be asked to do to make this work.

- There was no 'fat' in the business that we could have trimmed to give us any longer, everyone and everything was critical.

- As with everything Pronto, there is a lot more involved with our wind up than just sending everyone home, so closing will take some time.

- There are a number of parties that may be interest in our technical talent + technology. We have the most advanced tech for last mile delivery that is operating in London. However, our tech being entirely proprietary is designed exactly for our purposes. And as there is no one doing what we do in London, or trying to, and as repurposing it is probably impossible, there is more interest in just the technical team itself. I am pushing and will update if anything positive comes from this.

Finally, I am vividly conscious of every £ you have given.

Vividly conscious and thankful. I am writing this to an overwhelming portion of individuals who know my team or I, personally, and I can only again reiterate how much we thank you for your trust.

Monday, 5 September 2016

Escape the City raised money on Crowdcube in 2012 and has been very well featured on the platform as one of its stars.

4 years on, the company predicted an exit in 2016 or 2017. Oddly the amount raised as promoted by Crowdcube was £600k but there is only around £450k in the accounts. Still for Crowdcube that is accurate.

For the first time in its existence, Escape the City has reported a profit. £9,400, which if you split it between the 400 CC investors will give them a return on a par with the other 3 CC exits.

Oh come off it - we said we would look for good news and this is the best we could find!

The Funding Circle saga over loans not repaid by a Newquay development that was recently promoted by Verto Homes on their successful Crowdcube pitch, rattles on.

Despite many promises that the funding was just over the hill, the hill has continuously and mysteriously moved just out of reach. Funding Circle have been unwilling or unable to do a thing about it. The repayments were due in May. Almost £500k is still outstanding. According to FC, all 14 units in this development had been sold but that now appears to have been optimistic. At least 2 and possibly 4 have hit snags; the nature of which has been a closely guarded secret.

Meanwhile, as this situation developed on FC, Verto were raising equity funding on Crowdcube. The Crowdcube pitch made no mention of these late repayments - until we mentioned them. Verto claimed the loans were nothing to do with them. The development at Towan Heights was however the the main featured picture in their Crowdcube pitch. They had used an alternative vehicle to obtain the cash, which, once you lifted the covers, certainly had one leg wrapped around Verto Home's midriff.

It is no more or less than we have come to expect with Crowdcube. Minimal information, maximum smoke and mirrors equals commission.

According to information that we have received, Bitreserve, which raised over £6m on Crowdcube last year at a Crowdcube valuation of £60m, is now valued at around £22m.

Bitreserve, Cayman's registered company, is one of those Crowdcube raises that makes you wonder what the FCA does all day. According to the Crowdcube platform, the company raised over £6m but £5,873,280 was a single investment. That means the crowd put in only £600k.

The Crowdcube pitch majored on the founder and CEO -

''Halsey Minor is an Internet and tech pioneer who has founded and/ or financed many technology ventures: CNET, Salesforce.com, Rhapsody, OpenDNS, and Grand Central (Google Voice)''

Halsey is no longer with thecompany. There has been a change of key. The new CEO, Chairman, owner(?) and we assume largest shareholder is one Adrian Steckel - was he the £5,873,280 investor?. It turns out that Bitreserve got itself into some serious financial problems shortly after raising the money on Crowdcube and needed an emergency fund to bail it out. This resulted in the company being welcomed by its new benefactor Uphold, who proceeded to exercise their preference deal and essentially take over the company. Uphold is registered in the US and West Indies. Oddly their company website here still has Halsey as the CEO. This deal, made just after the Crowdcube raise, valued the same company worth £60m on Crowdcube, at just £22m. Investors via Crowdcube were not involved or consulted. As you may imagine the pitch and its financials have proved to be someway off the mark.Of course you will not have heard any of this from Crowdcube - they never megaphone any bad news. Uphold will be looking for more funding very shortly so it will be fascinating to see if they tap their old friends at Crowdcube and what story the two of them can concoct to fleece investors of more cash.Oh and finally the whole model that Bitreserve was based on, the one promoted by Crowdcube, turned out in less than 12 months to be total nonsense. So its all now been changed according to Uphold. You really couldn't make this up.

We had hoped a break would bring some change but alas same old same old. GamesGrabr latest Crowdcube pitch is a great illustration of why Crowdcube will never work.

Looking at the new Grabr pitch on Crowdcube, the platform has very kindly given us a comparison against the last raise. It makes for interesting reading and explains why the pitch has failed so far to get any backing.

Forced to try this new honesty, Crowdcube is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Its seems pretty obvious that projections showing 12 months revenue of over £400k which turn out to be around only £65k in reality, will not encourage enthusiasm in the management or their new, massively diluted plans. Halfway through their pitch and 15 investors have manged to hand over a meagre £1,420; despite the pitch highlighting a GOLD BADGE from Crowdrating ((: and using indirect quotes about the industry as if they are about their business.

Angel Alerts, by its own 2013 Crowdcube predictions now looking for an IPO or trade sale, posted a £7k profit on very small trading. Still at least they actually made some money which is very rare here.

Oh and while we were away the good news that Hybrid Air's Airlander had at last flown, turned into bad news as the airship crash landed. OOOPS.

September has some very large and juicy accounts to be filed - so dont go far. We may even find some good news!!!